Death Comes for the Fat Man

9

Kilda Kentmore stood at her bedroom window and watched the cars bumping across the field to the side of her house. This was the overflow car park. Not yet midday and already the main car-park must be full. The fine weather had brought the crowds out. Happily the same fine weather meant the ground surface was hard and firm. Last year it had rained, resulting in the double whammy of fewer visitors and the parking fields churned into a quagmire.

She yawned. For a long time after she’d been widowed, she hadn’t been able to sleep except when completely exhausted, and even then her terrible dreams had usually brought her cold and shaking back to the dark reality of life after very few minutes.

Well, she was over that now. Drink had helped, no denying that. But she was in control. There was a bottle of vodka on her dressing table. She could take a drink from it, or pour it down the loo, or just walk away from it.

That’s control. Running from it isn’t control, and hiding from it definitely isn’t.

Empty words she’d judged them when first she heard them, but they kept coming back till she acknowledged their truth. And the truth of the words that followed.

You need something, pointless denying it. But find something better. I’d guess you’ve got real talent. Use it.

At first this had come across as a clumsy nudge toward sex. Instead she now saw it as a clever nudge toward…not survival, she doubted if survival had ever been an option…but toward meaning, with the bonus en route of her first twelve-hour dreamless sleep from which she’d woken as fresh and bubbly as when she was a girl, with none of that back-of-the-eyes dullness which was the price she paid for punching herself unconscious with alcohol.

She picked up the photo of her husband that stood next to the bottle on her dressing table. In it he looked incredibly young and boyish, blond hair blowing in a stiff breeze as he stood in swimming trunks on the beach at Scarborough. Sometimes you had to wait an age for the Cartier-Bresson moment décisif, but occasionally it just happened. Not that she’d had any pretension to being a Cartier-Bresson, but she’d been making some headway out of the shallow waters of fashion photography when it happened. Maybe I should try photojournalism, she’d said to him when he told her the squadron was posted to Iraq. I could specialize in combat photography. Then I wouldn’t have to stay at home. No way, he’d replied, laughing. One crazy in the family’s quite enough. Go for grainy realism if you like, but no way do I want you within a hundred miles of a war zone.

She had photos of him in uniform, standing by his helicopter, and he’d even smuggled her onboard during a training flight and she had shots of him, very focused and professional, at the controls.

These she could not bear to have around her. In fact, until the last few weeks she hadn’t felt the least urge to use her camera equipment. But life-even pointless, unwished for life-is movement, one way or another.

She let her gaze drift from the photo to the mirror. She hadn’t put back on all the weight she’d lost in those first few months, but she was no longer the skeletal figure she had become for a while. OK, a lot of the restored calories might have come out of a bottle, but now this lean, taut body simply looked stripped for action.

She poured herself a glass of vodka. Her choice, her breakfast. Maurice had asked if she would be present at the fete’s official opening on the lawn in front of the big house. She’d replied with a cool, no. In fact, she’d gone on, I doubt if I’ll be in the mood for bucolic jollity at all. They were unbreakably linked by tragedy, but just because she shared a name with him and had not yet found the energy to break away from this grace-and-favor existence on the family estate didn’t mean she had to stand by his side at every public occasion. It was time he got himself a wife anyway. Someone like that Pascoe woman, strong, intelligent, passionate. It was a type he clearly admired. She might not be available, not for the moment anyway, but there must be plenty more like her swimming around, waiting to be trawled in.

She glanced through the window again, and lo and behold, there she was, Ellie Pascoe herself, climbing out of a dusty saloon, with her slim, sharp-eyed husband getting out of the driver’s door, and a young girl and dog spilling out of the back.

Now this was interesting. The woman had looked at her and not much liked what she saw. It had been fun to tease her by feigning to find her husband fuckable. As she’d said good night, she hadn’t thought there was a cat in hell’s chance of Maurice’s stupid suggestion being acted upon. What had happened to bring this about? Which of them had the impulse come from?

Unexpected things come in threes, whether good or bad. You break a cup at breakfast, there’ll be another couple of breakages before supper. You hear from a lost friend in the morning post, another two will emerge out of the mist before the day is out.

A green Skoda with a noisy engine nosed into the same row as the Pascoes. Out of the driver’s door slid a young woman in slacks and a belly-exposing top. Kilda recognized her as Kalim Sarhadi’s fiancée, Jamila. They’d met before the show the previous night, then sat around talking for what seemed an age while they waited for the police to take statements from the two men and Ellie Pascoe. The identification was confirmed when Sarhadi emerged from the passenger door. Presumably it was her car. He was a poor student, he’d told them last night, making enough money from helping with his father’s taxi business to pay for his fees at Bradford University. She was a secretary in the university registrar’s office, which was how they had met.

Kilda had listened to their self-revelations with the minimum effort necessary to conceal total uninterest, but Maurice had visibly basked in the young woman’s gratitude at his intervention during the threatened attack on Sarhadi. The young couple had also been invited to attend the Haresyke fete, but Kilda would have given even longer odds against their appearance than the Pascoes’.

As she watched, Ellie Pascoe spotted Sarhadi and called out to him. He turned, looked blank for a second, then recognized her. The two groups joined, Pascoe was introduced. The child also. Jamila looked ready to make much of her, but the girl quickly spotted that neither of the newcomers was particularly enthusiastic about the attentions of the small dog and responded with indifferent politeness.

Takes after her mother, judged Kilda. Quick judgments, doesn’t much care if they show. Unlike her husband, whose judgment was probably as keen if not keener but who knew how to mask its conclusions with smiling courtesy.

So, two unlikely events in a morning. She could either sit around and await the third, or forestall fate by creating it.

Only Maurice would really know how unlikely it was that she’d appear at the fete, but that ought to be enough. It might be interesting to see the slim cop again. While she’d done the cool flirtation thing to irritate his bossy wife, there had definitely been the whisper of a connection there.

She walked through her shower, dressed, breakfasted on crisp bread and black coffee, and made for the door.

Here she paused, then turned and ran lightly up the stairs and took her favorite Nikon off the top shelf of the wardrobe where it had been lying gathering dust ever since…

She pushed the thought from her mind and checked the battery. It was long dead, but she had plenty of spares in her darkroom.

A fly had buzzed in through the open window and was perched on the rim of the untouched glass of vodka.

“Have this one on me,” she said and a few moments later left her darkroom to go out into the sunshine.